Besides, it has been said that there are thousands of duplicated articles...
-- Alvaro On 21-01-2009, at 12:51, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA512 > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Anthony wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote: >>> >>> As will surprise none of the Knol nay-sayers here (in which number I >>> believe I can count myself), Knol hasn't done too great. >> >> Compared to what? I can't imagine Knol is much worse than >> Wikipedia when it >> was 6 months old. Knol just published its 100,000th article. When >> Wikipedia was 5 months old, it said on the main page "We've got >> over 6,000 >> pages already. We want to make over 100,000." The Wayback machine >> then >> skips ahead 5 more months, by which point Wikipedia brags "We >> started in >> January 2001 and already have over 13,000 articles. We want to make >> over >> 100,000, so let's get to work" >> >> To be sure, Knol has a lot of very serious problems with it. But >> it's only >> 6 months old. The concept is far from finalized. 6 months into >> Jimmy >> Wales' encyclopedia dream he was still working on Nupedia. >> >> Here's the Wikipedia on George Bush 19 months into Wikipedia: >> http://web.archive.org/web/20020817062610/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/George_Bush >> >> How long will it take you to find a better article on Barack Obama >> in Knol? > > With Wikipedia by this point, the basic concept of collaboration had > been proved. With Knol, we see only the divisiveness of the payments > system*, and a few isolated authors striving on their own. > > More to the point: yes, we should expect more of Knol than of > Wikipedia at similar stages! Knol has, by virtue of its position in > time, *numerous* advantages over Nupedia/Wikipedia. We should expect a > lot more. > > It has: > > 1) A clear license regime. Thanks to 8 years of Creative Commons, the > choice is not limited to just the GFDL (with its many problems). > 2) 8 years of hardware advances, or approximately 5 iterations of > Moore's law. > 3) 8 years of wiki development, demonstrating dead ends, the good > ideas, & what remains to be improved. Imagine if Knol had to start > with the state of the art in 2001. It would be truly gruesome. (Anyone > looked at the very old Wikipedias in Nostalgia, or old usemod wikis > like Ward's? They're hideous and unusable! They make me quite grateful > for 2009 MediaWiki with all its modern conveniences.) > 4) The backing of a commercial juggernaut. Quite aside from Knol's > hosting being a) very good; and b) not the Knol devs' concern, > Google's backing offers an array of advantages, from certainty to > excellent software development resources**, such as: > 5) Massive publicity. To be facetious, at launch Knol had infinitely > more publicity than did Wikipedia. > 6) A public educated to read wikis, and to use them. How many people > could Wikipedia hope to draw on at day 1 - that cared even a little > about Free content, that knew what a wiki was, that wouldn't dismiss > it as hopeless, and had an editing familiarity with wikis? Darned few. > We had to constantly evangelize and educate people about wikis, and by > dint of unremitting effort create the English Wikipedia and make it > interesting and valuable enough that people would contribute who > didn't fulfill any of those criteria. En was the existence proof that > large-scale wikis were possible and valuable. Knol, on the other hand, > can draw immediately on that pool of people Wikipedia created. > 7) A model targeted directly at people unhappy with Wikipedia. Are you > an expert tired of 'anti-expertism' on Wikipedia? Why try to get along > with those bumpkins when you could have your own article completely to > yourself on Google Knol (and get paid for't)? Wikipedia appealed to > those unhappy with Nupedia. Nupedia when Wikipedia launched was a lot > smaller than Wikipedia was when Knol launched. I think this pool of > possible contributors was thus also much larger for Knol than it was > for Wikipedia. > > etc. etc. > > * If I weren't so lazy, this is where I'd cite some of the studies > showing paying some contributors to FLOSS projects reduces > volunteerism. > ** Not to denigrate the efforts of Magnus and Tim and all the other > MediaWiki developers over the years, but one simply expects more of > full-time developers experienced with the famous Google infrastructure > and supposedly at Google's standards of excellence. > > - -- > gwern > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEAREKAAYFAkl3RIsACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oJWXwCfVL0x328tmey5rElGolu44PQj > 2RcAoIhofvJUWXmj0HoeJwbl+kPSftIB > =kEJG > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
